by Ronan Farrow
“I believed at the time, and still do, it was a good idea to do Kerry-Lugar-Berman, to make a grand gesture . . . to help raise the standard of living overall for the people and not just the military,” she told me. But spending the money proved just as fraught as announcing it. This, too, was partly an echo of the long history of transactional rapport—the relationship simply wasn’t set up to accommodate $1.5 billion a year in civilian assistance. It quickly became apparent that there was more money authorized than USAID could spend effectively. The result was, in the eyes of many Pakistanis, yet another broken promise—a hyped-up number that, after all the furor, never became a reality.
As in Afghanistan, there was a lack of technical expertise. In certain areas, like water infrastructure, there just wasn’t anyone qualified at USAID. I began pulling in outside groups and linking them up with the Pakistani government and USAID. But no amount of outside expertise could get the machine of US assistance moving fast enough to fit the timeline set by the wartime legislation. “The fact is, we weren’t doing much,” admitted Raphel, “because it takes a very long time to get going on stuff. So there was this huge expectation buildup and there was no way we could meet it.”
The same broken system that blighted Holbrooke’s efforts in Afghanistan frustrated Raphel’s struggle to get projects through the pipeline faster. Despite the quest to identify local NGOs, much of the Kerry-Lugar-Berman money went through hulking American contractors using layers of subcontracts. “We pissed away most of that money to contractors,” Raphel said flatly. And there wasn’t enough time to fix the issues. Five years are the blink of an eye in the context of infrastructure projects, and shorter than that, in terms of the long-term relationship change Holbrooke sought to effect. “I didn’t realize right at the beginning that it should have been a ten-year program, not a five-year program,” Raphel told me later, “because we couldn’t figure out quickly enough how to spend the money well.” Yet again, timelines dictated by military exigencies and domestic political pressures didn’t fit with the realities of diplomacy and development.
Then there was the pushback from the groups responsible for implementing the assistance—who, just like in Afghanistan, had little desire to be identified as a part of the American war effort. Holbrooke and Petraeus sold Kerry-Lugar-Berman on simple logic: we’d spend a lot of money on dams and schools, Pakistanis would see all those American dollars flowing and—hey presto!—Pakistan would transform from an avatar of the CIA in shadowy counterterrorism operations to a friend of the United States. Meetings about assistance to Pakistan often devolved into senior officials making increasingly desperate pleas for highly visible “signature projects” that could bring about this fabled winning of hearts and minds.
Holbrooke wanted that as much as anyone. In a picture taken at a refugee camp in Northwest Pakistan, he slouches next to a bearded Pakistani refugee, who sits lotus style with his young daughter in his lap. Holbrooke has taken off his sunglasses and sincere sympathy is written on his face, along with intense focus. Tufts of his graying hair stick out from underneath a khaki-colored hat emblazoned with “USAID” and then underneath, its slogan: “from the American people.” He took to wearing it a lot. “Seems like Pakistani press is taking particular interest in RCH”—Holbrooke’s initials—“baseball cap,” Vali Nasr wrote in an email to Holbrooke and his chief of staff, Rosemarie Pauli. “Does that have deeper meaning, Dr Freud?” Holbrooke wrote back. “It was practically the only sign, however temporary, that there was a US civilian effort. . . . Every other country’s aid here, even Iran’s, is better branded than us. Only our helicopters are visible. China’s field hospital (which I drove by in Thatta), Turkey, Saudi Arabia (I visited their refugee camp, where they are building a mosque), Australia (field hospital in Multan), Switzerland, UK, etc. While we hide and the NGO partners refuse to admit that we fund them.”
Holbrooke was right—in sensitive areas of Pakistan rife with violent anti-American sentiment, nongovernmental groups often tried to minimize the stars and stripes, fearing they could trigger attacks on workers. In the most volatile areas, the US even permitted the complete scrubbing of flags and USAID logos through waivers. This had long been a gentleman’s agreement. But Holbrooke began agitating, publicly and privately. He forwarded the exchange to Clinton aide Jake Sullivan, who forwarded it to Clinton. Days later, she raised the issue publicly, saying “we have to fight to get the US Government’s label on our material because a lot of our aid workers and our NGO partners are afraid to have association with the US Government.”
Suddenly, we were at war, with the groups responsible for much of the assistance at the heart of the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. “We’re aiding Pakistan. Don’t put a target on our backs,” blared the headline of a Washington Post op-ed written by the head of the NGO coalition InterAction. “In countries such as Liberia or Congo, US NGOs that get funding from the US government routinely promote the fact that they are delivering help ‘from the American people,’ ” wrote Sam Worthington. “But in Pakistan, where aid workers’ lives are more often at stake, an enforced branding campaign could. . . put the lives of Americans and their Pakistani colleagues at risk.” I was dispatched to quiet the storm, bringing the groups into the State Department and heading to a summit of NGOs to make the case against a boycott.
Both sides dug in. Judith McHale, the former Discovery Channel executive serving as Clinton’s undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, emailed the op-ed to Clinton, saying, “As you know I believe passionately that it is not in our national interests to continue to provide billions of dollars in aid and assistance without the very people we are helping knowing we are the ones providing the assistance.” Clinton replied: “Thx—I love working w you—I feel sometimes we were separated at birth!” Jake Sullivan chimed in, in an email to McHale: “Surely they shouldn’t hide their support, offering it covertly?” He added, using the one-letter abbreviation for the secretary of state: “S believes we should expand this beyond Pakistan—make the case for displaying the support of the American people throughout the world.”
As the crisis-management email chains ballooned, I was pulled in to help draft an op-ed that would run under the byline of Rajiv Shah, the head of USAID.
I was, absurdly, given my junior rank, the only person actively communicating with the groups threatening to pull out. It struck me that there was a thoughtful solution here—a more specific conversation not about whether American branding should be used, but about when and where and how—essentially an adjustment of the waiver policy that was already in place. Other changes, like working with local groups that had expressed a willingness to use the American flag, even in difficult areas, could have a greater impact than focusing on strong-arming Western groups that already faced controversy in Pakistan.
In a series of memos to Holbrooke and emails to the group, I tried to gently make the case. Holbrooke hit the roof. He called me into his office one night, after a reply I’d sent to the group suggesting a public acknowledgment of the waivers already available for unsafe areas. His face was slick with perspiration and he looked exhausted. He was, by then, facing off against an unfriendly White House almost daily. “Have you taken leave of your senses?” he thundered. He snatched the memo I’d brought him with such force it tore in half. I looked at the jagged half page in my hand and then at a vein standing out on Holbrooke’s forehead. “I know you think you’re special,” he raged on. “I know you think you have a destiny. That you’ll do great things. That you’ll make a difference for your country. I know you’ve felt sure of it ever since you were young—” even at the time, it was hard to avoid the feeling he’d stopped himself from saying “since you were in Vietnam.” A picture of young Holbrooke smiling from behind Coke-bottle glasses in the sunlight of the Mekong Delta stared at us from a nearby wall. “—But you have got to know your place. To pick your battles. To realize that even the best point isn’t a good point if no one wants to hear it. And right now, no one want
s to hear—DONNA?!” His assistant, a mild-mannered Southern grandmother named Donna Dejban, was standing outside his office door, gaping at us, weeping openly. “Donna. STOP. CRYING!” he bellowed.
The op-ed from Rajiv Shah ran in the Huffington Post, with a brief mention of waivers. None of the major implementers pulled out, and the assistance continued. But the dream of a sweeping new civilian assistance agenda in Pakistan never quite materialized. Much of the funding was never even appropriated by Congress. In some cases, acts of god interfered. US responses to flooding and a refugee crisis had to be bankrolled with the authorized funds. “Humanitarian aid siphoned off a lot of that,” said Kronstadt, the congressional researcher. More significantly, changes were afoot that would dramatically alter the stakes of the relationship—and with those changes came dramatically smaller appropriations.
IN MARCH 2010, Clinton and Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi sat at the head of a series of long tables arranged in a rectangle in the Ben Franklin Room. Behind them stood alternating US and Pakistani flags: red, white, and blue juxtaposing white crescents on green. A Pakistani delegation sat on Qureshi’s side and the Americans on Clinton’s, with Holbrooke around the corner from her. Even with the odds arrayed against him in his civilian funding surges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke forged ahead trying to bring the players to the table. He convinced Clinton that Pakistan—like weightier allies India and China—should receive an annual “strategic dialogue”: a high-level, ceremonial talk on the most pressing issues in a relationship.
Little of substance was discussed at that first meeting, and the commitments Qureshi did secure were all in the traditional arena of counterterrorism cooperation (“We’ve agreed to fast-track our requests that have been pending for months and years on the transfer of military equipment to Pakistan,” he gushed to reporters.) But the mere fact that it had occurred, after so many mishaps, was a small miracle. After the talks, Clinton stood with Qureshi in front of the blue walls and Corinthian pillars of the State Department Treaty Room and thanked Pakistan for its friendship. Holbrooke framed the talks as the beginning of a new kind of relationship: “Pakistan is important in its own right. We don’t view it simply as a function of its giant neighbor to the east or its war-torn neighbor to the west.” It was more aspiration than reality, but it was a start.
Holbrooke made the most of the opening. He championed additional, trilateral talks with Afghanistan. Working groups were spun out to address specific issues. Those were sometimes his best chance to tackle big challenges that exceeded his mandate, like restrictions on trade that were driven by animosity between Pakistan and India and strangled Pakistan’s economy. He couldn’t bring India to the table, but he pushed aggressively on trilateral talks with the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, culminating in the signing of an agreement to open up trade. It was the first breakthrough in a negotiating process that had been stalled, literally, since 1965. In 2015, even India began to signal its willingness to enter the trade pact.
Another trilateral working group’s focus—water policy—became a fixation for Holbrooke. In a little-publicized view, he came to believe mounting tensions over water issues could trigger a complete collapse of the uneasy peace between India and Pakistan. The Indus River basin fed both countries, running through India and disputed Kashmir on its way to Pakistan. A 1960 treaty, negotiated by the World Bank, split the various Indus rivers between the two countries. But climate change was putting stress on the tenuous arrangement. Floods threatened farmland on both sides of the border, increasing the risk of turf wars. Drought could trigger a similar effect, and was already a visible trend. One study predicted that shrinking glaciers would reduce the flows of the Indus by 8 percent by 2050. “If we ignore this,” Holbrooke told me, “it could very well precipitate World War III.” I gave him an incredulous look. He stayed absolutely serious.
Holbrooke raised the water dimension of the regional struggle in a National Security Council session, hoping he could expand his effort with higher level support. White House officials were incredulous and asked whether he was kidding. If there were any laughs to be had, Holbrooke’s would be the last—in 2016, the Indians began making ominous threats to pull out of the Indus Waters Treaty.
Realizing he was being frozen out, Holbrooke fought to have another official—Under Secretary of State Maria Otero—serve in a sort of informal water envoy role. (As usual, he was never confident that anyone who wasn’t him could do a job. “Is she okay?” he asked me after one of his briefing sessions with her. “Is she smart enough for this? This is important.”) And he kept pushing on talks. I spent months traipsing around the world with the water working group, to make sure they were integrating outside experts that could help them prepare for a potential crisis. A refrigerator magnet inexplicably given to me by the Pakistani government shows me, a handful of Department of Agriculture officials, and a Pakistani minister giving a thumbs-up next to equipment used for testing groundwater levels. At one point, we sat at the garish Ritz-Carlton in Doha trying to jumpstart a come-to-Jesus conversation between India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan on the subject. Bearded Afghans sat next to artificial lagoons declining piña coladas. It felt like a waste of time. India refused to send an official envoy.
But Holbrooke didn’t think he was tilting at windmills. Conversations between regional players, however halting, were happening—to an extent that hadn’t been seen in years. And the Pakistanis were moving against terrorists within their own borders to an extent they’d never managed before. “There was a period in 2009 where we thought, ‘This thing is really working,’ ” Petraeus told me. “And that was the period in which they did Swat, Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, South Waziristan. . . . We were providing fair amounts of financial, intel, training, infrastructure and logistics assistance, and we felt it was going very well.” Holbrooke seemed buoyed. Despite the obstacles, he told me, he was edging toward something important.
12
A-ROD
JUST AFTER THANKSGIVING in 2010, a sleek Falcon 900EX triple-engine jet touched down at the snow-blanketed Munich Airport. The jet belonged to the Bundesnachrichtendienst—Germany’s CIA—and had taken off from Qatar. Onboard was a man named Syed Tayyab Agha. He was in his late thirties, with youthful features and a neat black beard. He spoke English, choosing his words carefully, with a calm, measured demeanor. Agha was a longtime aide to Taliban leader Mullah Omar and had served in the regime’s embassy in Pakistan. He had been involved in years of sputtering efforts to start talks with the outside world, including an approach to the Afghans in 2008. His flight to Germany was the culmination of a year of careful negotiation led by Holbrooke’s German counterpart, Michael Steiner. Steiner, a thin, distinguished-looking man with craggy features and stooped shoulders, had also been Holbrooke’s German counterpart during Bosnia. He had a similar reputation for aggressive negotiating tactics and larger-than-life theatrics. (During a later stint as ambassador to India, he and his wife staged a reenactment of a popular Bollywood movie, complete with Steiner lip-syncing his way through song-and-dance numbers, that surely ranks as one of the strangest YouTube videos ever uploaded by the German Foreign Office.) He also shared Holbrooke’s belief that talks were the only way out of Afghanistan. German agents had communicated with Agha only indirectly, through intermediaries who kept his location secret. He confirmed his identity to the Germans by posting specific, agreed upon messages on official Taliban websites.
Agha was whisked away to a German intelligence safe house in an upscale village in the Bavarian countryside, not far from the city. Security was tight, with the area surrounding the safe house locked down. The next day, two Americans trudged through the cold to the house. One was a White House staffer named Jeff Hayes. The other was our deputy on Holbrooke’s team, Frank Ruggiero, who had served as the civilian adviser to the military in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. They joined Steiner, a Qatari prince who attended at Agha’s insistence as a guarantor of safety,
and Agha. It was the first time in a decade the United States had talked to the Taliban.
For Agha, the stakes were high. He was on German and American terrorist watch lists, and came only on commitments from both countries that he wouldn’t be arrested. Should al-Qaeda, or the al-Qaeda–friendly factions within Pakistan’s ISI, discover the talks, he risked a more gruesome fate. There was risk for the Americans, too. Just a year before, a supposed double agent informing on al-Qaeda to the Jordanian intelligence agency had been welcomed onto a base in Khost, Afghanistan. He turned out to be a triple agent, detonating a bomb and killing seven CIA officers. The memory was still fresh for everyone working on Afghanistan. German intelligence promised the Americans Agha had been vetted and searched.
The group was together for eleven hours. Several were devoted to sightseeing (the Taliban official was excited to see traditional German castles). Six hours were spent talking. Agha outlined the Taliban’s main concerns: its leaders wanted to be clearly distinguished from al-Qaeda, asked that Taliban names be removed from a UN sanctions list, and sought permission to open a political office in Qatar, not just in Pakistan where they currently operated. There was one more, almost obsessive focus: they wanted the release of Taliban prisoners held by the US in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. The Americans outlined their conditions: that the Taliban lay down arms, renounce al-Qaeda, and accept the Afghan constitution and its protections for women. And the United States had its own prisoner request: it wanted the release of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who had been captured by the Taliban after deserting from the Army a year before.